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AMSTETTEN, Austria: An elderly Austrian, portrayed by
media as a
“monster”, confessed Monday to imprisoning his daughter in
a cellar for 24 years and fathering her seven children, prosecutors
said.
Josef Fritzl, 73, “has admitted
building the dungeon and to holding his daughter and three children
there,” prosecution spokesman Gerhard Sedlacek told Agence France-Presse.
Fritzl also admitted incest
“but insisted there was no force involved,” said Sedlacek. One
of the children died at an early age.
Fritzl was scheduled to be
brought before an investigating magistrate on Monday evening and
face several more days of questioning over the case which has
shocked Austria.
Fourteen police meanwhile scoured
the three cramped underground rooms in the family house in Amstetten,
eastern Austria, where Elisabeth Fritzl and her children were held
prisoner.
She has alleged she was drugged
by her father in August 1984 and had been his prisoner ever since.
All seven children were born in the “dungeon.”
The six surviving children are
three boys and three girls aged between five and 20.
The rooms, measuring “50 to 60
square meters in all” and with a ceiling just 1.70 meters (5.5
feet) high were “furnished like a flat”, Sedlacek said.
Lower Austria police chief, Franz
Polzer, said there was “a wide range of questions that still need
answering” such as how Fritzl supplied the woman and children with
food, how the babies were born and cared for in such cramped
conditions, and how he could have incarcerated his victims for so
long without his wife knowing.
It is the latest in a series of
horror abuse cases to have stunned Austrians and newspapers asked
how authorities could again have failed to detect the woman.
The case came to light when one
of the children, now 19, was admitted to hospital in critical
condition.
Doctors looking for background
information stepped up efforts to find the mother. The whole
horrific story came to light when Fritzl allowed them to establish
contact with his daughter.
The Oesterreich tabloid featured
a six-page special report on what it termed as “the worst crime of
all time.” “How can this happen here?” asked Die Presse.
“Amstetten is in a state of
shock,” wrote Mayor Herbert Katzengruber on the town’s website.
“Our thoughts and feelings are with the victims.”
DNA tests are being carried out
to establish if Fritzl is the father of the six surviving children.
The seventh child, a twin, is believed to have died shortly after
birth and the body subsequently burned, police said.
The Kronen-Zeitung tabloid
portrayed Fritzl as a keen fisherman, popular among neighbors and
locals, but a “monster, a brutal tyrant” in the cellar of his
own home.
He legally adopted two of the
boys and one girl, allegedly telling his wife, Rosemarie, and local
authorities that three babies had been left by Elisabeth on their
doorstep, in different years.
Each delivery was accompanied by
a letter purportedly signed by Elisabeth Fritzl saying she could not
support the child because she already had others to care for.
The trio went to school as
normal, seemingly unaware that their mother and three other siblings
(a girl of 19, and boys at 18 and five) were trapped underground.
Neither neighbors nor social
services appear to have had any inkling, either.
“They had a swimming pool in
the garden, we would hear them laughing the three of them,” said
one neighbor.
Another backed up the story of
the babies on the doorstep, adding: “[Rosemarie] always looked
after the kids so well, taking them to school. We said ‘it’s
incredible what she manages to do at her age’.”
Elisabeth Fritzl told
investigators her mother knew nothing about the sexual abuse she had
endured since the age of 11, some seven years before she was locked
away.
Austria’s most notable prior
case was that of Natascha Kampusch, locked up by a man in the
basement of a house for eight years before she escaped.
Kampusch was 10 when Wolfgang
Priklopil abducted her on her way to school in 1998. The 44-year-old
kidnapper killed himself hours after she fled, throwing himself
under a train.
Three young girls were also
locked up for seven years by their mentally ill mother near Linz.
--AFP
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